You’re Self-Compassionate. But Are You Warm With Yourself? What is the temperature of your inner life?

I know so many of us work on self-kindness, self-compassion, self-acceptance, self-regulation, self-worth…

But I don't know that I've ever been asked if I was warm with myself. Or if these things resided inside a climate of warmth. I came to find that often these qualities, that one might assume were warm, were for many…lacking in warmth.

Warmth is something we know viscerally. It’s physiological. Relational. Somatic. Warmth in being held against a warm, caring body. Warmth of laying in the sun in the sunshine. Warmth of certain homes and families, even cultures. The particular full body feeling of being welcomed into a fragrant kitchen where people are cooking and talking and there is room for you too. We know what it is to sit close to someone we love, to be gathered around a fire.

Perhaps I’d call warmth the temperature of belonging. 

Large and atmospheric and containing. I imagine lying bare-skinned on a warm rock by a river. But taken inward, toward myself. I am safe and warm in here, even if things out there are not.

And as I explored warmth, I began to find that this particular atmosphere of our inner self, on its own, without force or doing, allowed for the natural emergence of self-kindness, self-compassion, acceptance, regulation, worth.

And yet this overarching quality seems largely absent from how we talk psychologically about our relationship with ourselves.

I wonder if somewhere amidst the increasingly sophisticated understanding of our inner lives, we have overlooked something much more ordinary and ancient and biologically necessary. 

What is it like to actually live inside yourself? And is it warm there?

Not even whether you like yourself. Or how much you've tamed your inner critic. Or how much of your wise, loving adult is online. All very important, hard-won things in our often punitive culture.

But, can your own presence have some of the quality of sitting beside a fire with loved ones? 

Can there be a kind of warmth around your experience that isn't trying to accomplish anything or directed toward anything? Just a soft, cozy, dim candlelit ambiance? Not the bright harsh light of an LED, the way some of our psychological endeavors encourage us to be towards ourselves. A different quality of attention. 15 watt-bulb-warm. A grandmother's worn-in blanket and cooing voice, warm. 

I notice the sensation in my body before I understand it intellectually. It's visceral. There’s a difference between accepting that my stomach hurts and giving it love, and having that hurt exist inside a cozy stove-fire room. It even feels different to simply not judge myself for being scared and to be scared somewhere that feels warm.

As I first began to realize its absence in my own self, and began evoking it, I felt like I just melted into softness. Different from surrender, which can feel like falling into nothingness, without knowing where the bottom is or what will be there. Instead, I was being held, buoyant, my entire organism surrounded, like a summer day when one’s body temperature and the air feel as one.

The warmth isn't necessarily a feeling I'm having. It was the weather.

And perhaps that's part of why warmth is so easy to miss.

A climate is the invisible air we breathe, and often, we don’t even realize what we are breathing in.

The human psyche has become something to understand, regulate, rewire, heal, optimize, or fix. 

Managing our triggers, regulating our nervous systems, soothing ourselves, challenging our thoughts, tending to our wounded parts. All deeply useful things. I’ve done, and do, them, too. 

And while an environment of compassion in particular can be poignantly warm, it can also be without warmth. More of an action towards. All these thing can happen from one part of ourselves to another, not necessarily surrounding us. We can become very good at soothing ourselves without being warm with ourselves. We can accept what we're feeling while the larger somatic climate remains neutral, or even cool.

Perhaps that's because each of these gives us something to do.

Warmth isn't necessarily directed toward anything. Loving something implies an object: there is a lover and something being loved. Soothing implies something that needs soothing. Compassion has suffering specifically towards which the compassion moves. Even internally, there can be a subtle division: the loving adult and the hurt child, the compassionate self and the suffering self.

But when you simply wrap the current reality in atmospheric warmth, that division can disappear, and the things inside it can then naturally loosen their grip. The whole organism is bathed in warmth.

But how do you practice an atmosphere? 

Warmth seems less straightforward because the thing you're cultivating is the felt climate in which all other practices, and all things, take place. And because it's so deeply physiological and relational, and the setting itself,  it's hard to cultivate. 

Perhaps it becomes in part a sensory, imaginative cultivation. Or rather, an embodied evocation. It is not an intellectual exercise. 

And perhaps we also need warm others. Warm relational experiences. 

Because warmth is something we experience between people before we ever think about generating it within ourselves. There are people, cultures too, whose presence simply feels warm and embracing: Come here, sweet one. Rest your head on my lap. Let me wrap you up. 

Maybe part of developing an internal climate of warmth is actually letting ourselves physically take in those experiences, however small—letting another person's warmth reach us enough that it becomes something our own bodies know better.

And yet, this may also be a primary reason warmth is difficult to cultivate.

Many of us don't live in particularly warm societies. Or unconditionally warm ones. Low belonging, isolation, or high belonging based on conformity, or competition, status hierarchy—all of these can contribute to a general climate of low warmth, even if it’s high on gregariousness or collectivity.

And warmth itself can become complicated, because warmth invites softening.

Many of us live in social worlds in which we are individually responsible for determining who is safe, protecting ourselves when someone isn't, and managing what happens between us and another person. Even the people we love can therefore remain, in some subtle way, people we have to stay alert to. 

Even our chosen, generally very safe partners can remain people we monitor in small relational ways. Will they understand me? Invalidate me? Disagree? Withdraw? When so much responsibility for our own relational safety falls to us—as opposed to being held, protected, and regulated in part by a larger social surround—even ordinary otherness can become something the organism learns to watch.

And what does an organism do when the very people from whom it seeks warmth are also among the things it has learned to watch?

We may become very good at compassion, self-soothing, regulation and all the other ways we've learned to care for ourselves, while some deeper layer of our organism remains hypervigilant.

While it is possible to be vigilant when needed and warm inside ourselves, I wonder if it is impossible to be hypervigilant and warm with ourselves. Because the self softening and trust and safety within self that can occur with warmth is an antithesis to hypervigilance. Not that the outside world gets safer, but the climate inside no matter what happens, does. 

And in fact, it becomes easier to know when one is truly in danger or not, and better able to respond, when we are warmer with ourselves, because we are then able to more fully inhabit ourselves.

This is hard to do as human animals to begin with, and even harder in the societies we live in. 

But perhaps we can begin imagining, if nothing else, what might change if we cultivated more of it for ourselves, and then let that warmth permeate outward.

A safe surround of warmth, when accompanied by a secure center (and they can cyclically help one another grow into being) allows us to be more of ourselves. To even say or do more easily the hard, self-owned thing, from inside our own warmth. Not to make ourselves more palatable. But because it can change how much we can stay inside ourselves when it’s that welcoming within.